Simple Intent (17 page)

The old man smiled. The black-haired gentleman shook his hand then poured another round of the rare Sportoletti-Villa Fidelia port. Deluca sunk into the cordovan leather and listened to tales of dangerous safaris with man-eating lions, beautiful European courtesans and wives that never asked questions. He was pleased and comforted in the presence of these great and influential men. Comforted by the knowledge that they accepted him into the fold and pleased that right now, they needed him. He sipped his port, admired the foxhunt oil over the fireplace and wondered where he could get a pair of those boots.

Finished with Deluca’s motion, Sailor went back to her cubicle. She squirmed uncomfortably on the cheap task chair, her ass spoiled by partner luxury. Scraping around in her purse, she found a stale Tootsie roll and two breath mints; dinner and dessert. 

She popped a mint into her mouth then scooped up the crumpled papers by her chair and spun to face the wastebasket. She leaned back and took aim like a professional basketball player, then let it fly.

“She shoots, she scores! The crowd goes wild!”

Sailor did a little victory dance in her chair, tapping her nylon-covered toes and shaking her breasts, her hands pumping to the ceiling. She finished off with a wild spin of the chair and when it stopped moving she opened her eyes. 

Jeremy Strom stood outside her cubicle, looking delicious and grinning ear-to-ear.

Oh shit. “Jeremy, I-well, how are you?” 

She rolled her chair back and reached up to fluff her hair. She felt around under the desk with her toes trying to connect with her shoes. 

Jeremy said, “I was hoping I’d find you here. I know I said Tuesday, but something came up. How about, today instead?” He produced a large brown bag from behind his back. 

“Let me check my schedule.” Sailor mimed turning calendar pages. “Well. Look at that. I happen to be free.” 

Jeremy borrowed a chair from another cubicle while Sailor cleared her desk and arranged the spread: two Reubens on rye, a turkey club supreme, Hawaiian chips, pickles, cookies, and real egg creams. 

They sat knee-to-knee in the cramped space. Jeremy’s tree-trunk thighs hid the small desk chair. He was so close that Sailor could feel the warmth radiating from his sun-tanned skin. She snuck another peek at this beautiful man, his white t-shirt stretched across his huge chest, binding at the sleeves over bulging biceps. She wondered how anything ever fit loosely on a body like that? He wore Italian sandals and beat-up denim shorts—which had the beginnings of holes in all the right places. Golden hair on his legs and arms glistened in a sea of bronze. 

He said, “This is nice.”

Sailor smiled. “Yeah it is.”

Jeremy twisted open the drinks, handed her half a sandwich on a napkin. In other places, at other times, Strong’s ham-like hands maimed and killed. But here with her, they served with grace and tenderness. She wondered if Jeremy would still like her when she started asking questions about Deluca.

Maria Chetta sat in her kitchen with a cup of tea. She told herself that waiting for her chef to return wasn’t odd, nor was the fact that she was concerned for his welfare. Stephan would find it endearing. They would laugh about this when he came in. He’d tease her for months that she mothered him. And maybe she did. But he should have been back hours ago. If he’d run into friends or had car trouble, he would have called. Maria wouldn’t have been this worried before Lou Gallo reappeared in her life. But once he was in the picture, everything changed.

IT'S a matter of supply and demand. You supply whatever I demand.”

The walking billboard for Gold’s gym laughed. “That’s good, Tone, supply and demand.” 

The man behind the desk didn’t look so hot. After a couple of slaps, his toupee had gone west, hanging off his head at a queer angle. His shirt buttons littered his desk, and his pants had acquired a mysterious stain in the crotch area.

If Vince Gable had known he was having company this morning, he would have been prepared. He would have locked the door to the tin house on the docks.

With the Union talking strike and Immigration hanging around, he’d been camped in the trailer for three days. And now this.

“Look, Mister Cigars. I told you, I was going right out there. I just had to make some calls, grab a coffee. These guys never get here on time, they have their own plans. You really didn’t need to bother yourself with this. See?’ He tapped a sheet of paper on his desk. “I got the numbers and the locations right here. I’m pretty sure you’ll be pleased, not like the last time.” 

“Jesus! Shut him up, will ya?’ Tony Cigars rubbed his jaw and twisted his head around until his neck cracked. 

Billboard moved in. “What you want me to do, Tone?” 

“Just shut him the fuck up!” 

The guy behind the desk blinked his watery Pekinese eyes, shrinking back into his chair. The toupee completed its slide revealing a red swollen ear and a ring of hair like a Trappist monk. 

“I told you, Vince.” Tony reached for his lighter. “You know the trip. Out to the yard and back, then put the dogs up.” He paused to light a half-chewed cigar, “And turn off the video monitors. There’s no one else here, nothing for you to do but whack off. What the fuck you been doing all morning? I got three pissed-off guys out there running a truck and wasting gas. Now you’re cutting into my delivery time. You want me to call in your marker, Vince? That it?”

“No. No, I told you, it wasn’t my fault.” 

Billboard took another step. Vince raised his pale, nail-bitten hands. “Please Mr. Cigars. Don’t let him hit me again. Here.” He held the paper over his head like it was raining. “The gate’s open, just pull that plug over there.”

“Plug? What plug? This plug, Vince?’ Tony Cigars reached down and yanked the cord of a large black plug. The trailer shook, monitors went dark. 

“Good one, Tone.”

The two men stepped down from the trailer, headed across the terminal yard toward a stack of containers and a forklift. The rumble of the idling tractor-trailer became a whine as the big vehicle shifted gears and pulled into view.

Vince Gable adjusted his hair then looked out the window. “Fucking guys. What am I going to tell Marie? This shirt was a gift from her sister. I swear to God,” he said as he raised his right hand to the ceiling, “I will never bet on the ponies again.”

Reilly had been dreaming the Sailor dream. She leaned into him saying, “There’s something I need to tell you.” But then he woke up. It took him a second to realize he wasn’t in that garden. And he wasn’t with Sailor. He was naked in someone else’s bed. He traced his finger down a beautiful curved spine, cupped the warm buttocks in his hands. Gina shivered, then rolled over to face him, whispering, “Morning.”

Parked in his car across the street, Hiram Berger sipped cold coffee from a Styrofoam cup. There was just enough left to wash down the greasy egg sandwich. He yawned and scooted down in the seat, folded his arms and tipped his head back for a quick nap. He’d been sitting out here since midnight and hadn’t seen a thing. Maybe he’d misread her. Maybe it had only sounded like she was making up the whole thing about girl’s night out. But he’d driven over anyway, and now it was six a.m., and time was beginning to wear on him.

The screen door slammed. Berger jerked awake. Shit. A cab idled at the curb. The man Gina kissed goodbye was young and handsome and somehow familiar, like the guy you see on a game show and swear you’ve seen him in the produce section of Genuardi’s. Berger watched her wave from the porch, holding her red robe closed. The robe he’d given her last Christmas. Then he remembered where he’d seen the guy. His retirement party. Fuckin’ Gallo. Can’t take no for an answer, so now he’s got his boy shtupping my lady. We’ll just see about that.

Hiram Berger’s sleep-deprived, pill-addled brain, wrapped itself around an idea. Gina was his and he would not lose her. She was just mad at him, like before. He’d buy her something nice, show her how he’d changed. He’d win her back. Whatever it took. Berger followed the cab downtown to a fancy condo complex. He took a container of pills from the glove box and watched the guy enter the building. Berger swallowed the pills. He could give Gina whatever she wanted, didn’t she know that? He pulled into traffic without looking, a screech of brakes behind him. 

The self-storage facility was located at the rear of a run-down industrial park. Faded names of fly-by-night businesses appeared as shadows on the park’s signboard. Berger passed empty warehouses and forgotten offices partially hidden by unkempt landscaping. He pulled up to the entry gate and entered the code. Moments later he parked in front of J19 and turned off the Impala’s engine.

The resident manager, Bob Murphy, caught a glimpse of Berger as he drove to his unit. He trained one of the mobile cameras mounted to Building J on the new arrival and checked the time. He watched his customer work the keypad then pull up the overhead door.

Eight minutes later, Berger was back on the screen. He stormed from the unit, pulling the door down behind him so abruptly it hit bottom and bounced back up again. There was no sound on the monitor, but Bob could tell the guy was pissed from the way the car sped off. 

“Oh shit.” Bob winced. The pissed-off dude was headed his way.

Berger crashed through the front door, stood there in the lobby, yelling to the walls, “I need to see the manager, and I need to see him now!”

Bob zoomed in with the ceiling-mounted camera. It didn’t look like the guy was packing. Still, Bob really didn’t want to deal with a looney. He pulled the file for J19, keyed the intercom.

“What seems to be the matter, Sir?”

“What seems to be the matter? I’ve been ripped off! That’s what seems to be the matter. Now I want to see the manager, and I want to see him now.”

Bob decided being the manager wasn’t a good thing today, so he said, “He’s not here right now. Come back after two.”

“Listen asshole, I need to know who’s been in my space, and when, and I know you can do that!” Berger stepped up to the camera, making his point with what looked like a very large hand.

“Okay, okay. Hang on, man.” Bob flipped through the log for unit J19. The computerized tracking system enabled facility operators to track activity inside each unit. It showed dates and times of each unit’s entry and departure, and from the looks of it, J19 was a pretty lonely place. 

Bob keyed the intercom, “Sir, I don’t see any recent activity.” He flipped a page. “Just the one visit last week, and today.”

Berger stared slack-faced into the camera. “What?”

Bob spoke up, “Other than today’s visit, and ten p.m. Sunday, there hasn’t been any activity at your unit in over three months.”

Berger was still staring into the camera when he said, “That motherfucker.” Then he wrenched the door open and stomped to his car, muttering the whole way. 

Bob watched the Impala speed away and hoped that whoever J19 was headed for would be well warned the dude was coming. 

Banning hung up the phone, made a note in the file, then buzzed Helen.

“Yes?”

“Could you check with Paris, and see if she still has any contacts over at the courthouse?”

“Sure. What do you need?”

“I need Judge Shanahan’s schedule. I want to talk to him about the Bentley case. He’s our best chance.”

“Okay. Let me track her down.” 

Helen was already on the other line, paging Paris Kendrick when Banning clicked off. She hoped there was still someone over at Shanahan’s that Paris could sleep with.

Who else knew about the money in the storage unit? Berger didn’t remember telling anyone and that was the problem. When he combined booze with the pills, he was hard pressed to remember the last time he ate, much less what he said. He went over the possibilities, holding them in his mouth like marbles or whipped cream. The more he moved the ideas around the more he wanted to spit out, “Gallo.” 

Gallo had threatened him during their meeting at the docks. He’d said, “You do this for me, Detective, and I’ll let you keep your retirement plan.” At the time, Berger figured he was talking about the cop severance pay, and their old deal—the one where Berger quietly disappears to his house in the mountains with Gina. Now he was thinking that Gallo had a very different plan in mind, and it was just a hop across that mental terrain to conclude that it was Lou Gallo, who had taken his million in cash. 

Deluca read the front page of the newspaper. Insiders say Strike is Imminent-Two Sides at Odds Over Benefits. A union strike, even a slowdown like the one they had planned would disrupt the regular scheduling of thousands of ships loading and offloading at The Port of Philadelphia. According to economists, it would cost a billion dollars a day with dire consequences for the entire North American economy. 

Deluca dropped the paper. 

It had taken Berger almost an hour to buy the supplies. By the time he pulled into the garage, he knew there was no way he was going to let Gallo, or anyone else, get the best of him. Whoever said revenge was sweet had gotten that fucking right. I’m going to hit you where it hurts, Lou. Right in the wallet.

Berger tossed the book in the fireplace and watched it burn. Part of the cover curled back; the seal of The United States Government was barely visible as the flames rose higher.